What do high school teachers want from their students when they arrive in Year 9? This is an important question. One of the biggest jumps in education in New Zealand is from primary/intermediate (years 1 to 8) to secondary (Years 9 to 13). In most cases children are taught by generalist teachers in primary/intermediate (which I will call primary from now on) and by specialist maths teachers at secondary school. Please be clear that this is NOT a criticism of Primary teachers. Primary teachers do an amazing job teaching such a wide range of subjects in a crowded curriculum to […]

Not all that is good needs to be done That something is a good thing to do and will improve learning outcomes for all students, is not sufficient reason for doing it. I have recently become aware of the Learning Progression Framework. As explained in a previous post, there are multiple ways of expressing the level of learning in maths for learners in New Zealand schools, including the New Zealand curriculum (broad brush), Numeracy project stages (fine uni-dimensional and embraced by Primary teachers) and National Standards (no longer current, but casting a long shadow.) To this the LPF adds steps, […]

What has love got to do with maths? This morning at the Twitter chat for teachers, (#bfc630nz) the discussion question was, How and what will you teach your students about life this year? As I lurked I was impressed at the ideas and ideals expressed by a mixed bunch of teachers from throughout New Zealand. I tweeted: “I wonder how often maths teachers think about educating the heart. Yet maths affects how people feel so much.” My teaching philosophy is summed up as “head, heart and hands”. I find the philosophy of constructivism appealing, that people create their own understanding […]

Last week I had a lovely experience. I visited the Hamilton Observatory and Zoo as part of a Statistics excursion with the Year 13 statistics class of Papamoa College. The trip was organised to help students learn about where data comes from. I went along because I really love teachers and students, and it was an opportunity to experience innovation by a team of wonderful teachers. The students travelled from Papamoa to Hamilton, stopping for pizza in Cambridge. When we got to the Hamilton Observatory, Dave welcomed us and gave an excellent talk about the stars and data. I found […]

Calculus is the wrong summit of the pyramid. “The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. And at top of that pyramid, it’s calculus. And I’m here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid … that the correct summit — that all of our students, every high school graduate should know — should be statistics: probability and statistics.” Ted talk by Arthur Benjamin in February 2009. Watch it – it’s only 3 minutes long. […]

I have a guilty secret. I really love probability problems. I am so happy to be making videos about probability just now, and conditional probability and distributions and all that fun stuff. I am a little disappointed that we won’t be doing decision trees with Bayesian review, calculating EVPI. That is such fun, but I gave up teaching that some years ago. The reason probability is fun is because it is really mathematics, and puzzles and logic. I love permutations and combinations too – there is something cool about working out how many ways something can happen. So why should I […]

The way we understand and make sense of variation in the world affects decisions we make. Part of understanding variation is understanding the difference between deterministic and probabilistic (stochastic) models. The NZ curriculum specifies the following learning outcome: “Selects and uses appropriate methods to investigate probability situations including experiments, simulations, and theoretical probability, distinguishing between deterministic and probabilistic models.” This is at level 8 of the curriculum, the highest level of secondary schooling. Deterministic and probabilistic models are not familiar to all teachers of mathematics and statistics, so I’m writing about it today. Model The term, model, is itself challenging. […]

Twenty-first century Junior Woodchuck Guidebook I grew up reading Donald Duck comics. I love the Junior Woodchucks, and their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. The Guidebook is a small paperback book, containing information on every conceivable subject, including geography, mythology, history, literature and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In our family, when we want to know something or check some piece of information, we talk about consulting the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. (Imagine my joy when I discovered that a woodchuck is another name for a groundhog, the star of my favourite movie!) What we are referring to is the internet, the source […]

The whole may be greater than the sum of the parts, but the whole still needs those parts. A reflective teacher will think carefully about when to concentrate on the whole, and when on the parts. Golf If you were teaching someone golf, you wouldn’t spend days on a driving range, never going out on a course. Your student would not get the idea of what the game is, or why they need to be able to drive straight and to a desired length. Nor would it be much fun! Similarly if the person only played games of golf it […]

The problem with probability is that it doesn’t really exist. Certainly it never exists in the past [once we know the outcome]. (Looking for the Experimental Design post linked from our Newsletter? Use this link.) Probability is an invention we use to communicate our thoughts about how likely something is to happen. We have collectively agreed that 1 is a certain event and 0 is impossible. 0.5 means that there is just as much chance of something happening as not. We have some shared perception that 0.9 means that something is much more likely to happen than to not happen. […]